Archives

Social

Blog Stats

72,135 hits

Search for:

Samar Halarnkar and Ethics?

Let us presume there are two people named Samar and Frances.

Below I am going to reproduce, verbatim, some extracts from an article each wrote at different times and in different publications. The extracts from article by Samar will be followed by extracts from article of Frances.

At present, just compare the two extracts in each exhibit, one by Samar and the other by Frances.

Exhibit 01:

Samar : “In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo’s children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen”

Frances : “Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship”

Exhibit 02:

Samar : “These did not remain words. Patrus Ananais, then Belo’s new mayor, created a council of businessmen, church leaders, labour representatives and other citizens to launch the battle against hunger.”

Frances : “The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.”

Exhibit 03:

Samar : “Local farmers were, and are, given prime public spots to sell their produce to consumers, thus eliminating retail commissions that reached 100%, a situation not unfamiliar to India. The poor got access to cheap food, and farmers, themselves poor, prospered at a time when farm incomes were declining across Brazil.”

Frances : “It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.”

Exhibit 04:

Samar : “In addition, Belo grants entrepreneurs rights to run, on public land, 34 local retail markets, where the government fixes the price, usually about two-thirds of the market price, for about 20 healthy foods. Other food can be sold at market price.”

Frances : “In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city makes good food available by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets, from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices.” Today there are 34 such markets where the city determines a set price—about two-thirds of the market price—of about twenty healthy items, mostly from in-state farmers and chosen by store-owners. Everything else they can sell at the market price.”

Exhibit 05 :

Samar : “Perhaps the biggest direct cushion against hunger is Belo’s series of government-run cafeterias. Each offers people — not just to those officially declared poor — hot meals (rice, beans, salad, ground beef and an apple) for about Rs. 50.”

Frances : “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Exhibit 06 :

Samar : ‘The local university is deeply involved in keeping the system honest and functioning. Students survey the prices of more than 40 basic foods, supply these to local media outlets and paste them on walls and bus stands.”

Frances : “For instance, the city, in partnership with a local university, is working to “keep the market honest in part simply by providing information,” Adriana told us. They survey the price of 45 basic foods and household items at dozens of supermarkets, then post the results at bus stops”

Now I do not want you to bore with further exhibits (although there are a few more) so let me summarize in a few points below:

1. Who is Samar ?

Samar is Samar Halarnkar. Who is he? As per last available public information, he is Editor-at-large (whatever that means) of Hindustan Times, a very prominent English language National Newspaper in India.

2. Who is Frances?

Frances is Frances Moore Lappé. Who is she? Frances has done a life time work on hunger, poverty and environment and has authored 18 books, among them the best selling, “Diet for a Small Planet”.

3. What is the above all about:

Samar wrote a piece titled “Not Much on the Plate” in Hindustan Times on April 11, 2012. He was writing on India’s abysmal failure in controlling poverty and hunger and the impending arrival of Food Security Bill as a means to solve it. Apparently Samar wanted to educate the readers as to how the problem has been solved elsewhere in the world. By his own admission Samar has never been to Brazil (at least not till the time of publication of this piece) but he has been merely “following” the success story of Belo Horizonte and wanted the readers to benefit from his knowledge.

Frances, the world-renowned expert on the field, also wrote on the Belo Horizonte experiment. When? On Feb 13, 2009 for Yes Magazine. You read it right, more than 3 years before Samar.

Now read the extracts again. In each exhibit. And compare. If you deduce that Samar, writing on his self-proclaimed area of interest, 3 years later, offers absolutely nothing new, as compared to what Frances wrote in 2009, then you conclude the same as me and many others. If you deduce that the narrative of two articles, the sequencing of the information about Belo and in fact most of the wordings are also same, then you conclude the same as me.If you deduce that EVERY information in Samar’s article about Belo is the same as that in the article of Frances, then you deduce the same as me.If you deduce that this is a straight lift off, without attribution, then you might not be far off the mark.

Here is one small test to measure Samar’s original research, if any. Frances, who went to Belo for her original research in 2009, writes that one of the innovations in Belo was “food at low prices” markets. Till 2009, they had been able to establish 34 such markets. How many did Samar find in 2012? If you thought Belo would continue its good work and would have added some more markets, hell no. Samar found the exact same number – 34 !

Incidentally, Frances went to Belo before she wrote her research piece. Samar, by his own admission has been only “following” the story without ever going to Brazil.

Finally, this is how Frances begins her Yes Magazine piece: “Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy”.

This is how Samar credits Frances in the middle of his article : ‘”Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy,” writes Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet (a 1971 bestseller on meat production and global food scarcity). She recently visited Belo and noted how the hunger programme benefited a fourth of the city’s inhabitants and cut the infant death rate by more than half in a decade.”

That is all. Nothing else. Nothing more. No mention of any article Frances wrote or any data she gave and he may have used. Incidentally, 2009, when Frances visited Belo, is not “recent’ in 2012. Of course, Yes Magazine, where Frances wrote her Belo experience, is not mentioned at all. Twisting of the knife, did you say?

Notes:

1. The apparent similarities between these two articles, spaced three years apart, were first brought out by Rakesh Babu G R. He has provided us with the original links. The entire credit for bringing this to light, must go to him. He tweets at @raksopenmind .

I must also thank Sathya Anand ( @SathyaSher ) for fishing out the links again when I started writing this blog post.

2. Samar Halarnkar, from what I understand, is part of an endangered species of “Indian liberals”. He tweets at handle @samar11.

2. Website News Laundry picked up the issue as it raged in the online world and did a thorough examination of the issues involved. It also presented two detailed responses from Mr. Halarnkar and comments of News Laundry team on Samar’s responses. Here is the link :

3. A debate was raging in the online world that Firstpost, a news website, had initially decided to run this story but then dropped the idea. R. Jaggannathan, Editor in Chief of Firstpot, in an interview to Madhu Tehan, expanded on his reasons for doing so. Here is the link : (Timer mark 10 : 35 to 13 : 35 )

4. Mihir S. Sharma , a columnist with Business Standard, wrote a rather detailed piece on instances such as the one described in this blog, in his 20th September column. The column also discussed Samar’s case in some detail and his take on it. Here is the link :

0.0000000.000000

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Post navigation

24 thoughts on “Samar Halarnkar and Ethics?”

scarcity of democracy is the reason people starve? Why then in our democratic world, where democratic states have sprung up everywhere, do we have twice as many people starving today than 40 years ago? Clearly, at least to wise people, democracies aren’t working. @ramarajya

democracies underpinned by capitalism have actually resulted in more people starving….Locke’s libertarianism is fatally flawed as we see individuals as not morally good, but exceedingly selfish, as elites grow fat and die of obesity as they drive their expensive cars whilst children starve to death. Anyone who pouts democracy as the some type of universal panacea is, humbly, a fool

Quite a good effort there Akhilesh, but this Samar guy has been smart. He tweaked around the wordings of every passage he copied, to make it appear as if it was his own. Very hard to make out by any average person. The worst he can be accused off is, just rehashing a post based on a 3yrs old article, something that is de facto in most media.

What is funny is that an Eminent Editor would take so much time to Edit his own column! Its like the English teachers in our schools used to say when they saw that the answers were same in two or more answer papers…”The amount of time you spent in copying, would have been better spent in coming up with your own answers!”

Well exposed and funny, No 5 foot note of urs -“the views expressed by the author is personal” he hee, that would mean
“the plagiarism is personal not that of the publishers?” grt Journalism-Publishers are always safe as DNA escaped criminal charges being the publisher of the controversial article of Dr Swamy-Only the author not the publisher
hmm

Another Fareed Zakaria! At least Zakaria apologized for the error of his ways Hope Samar will do the same. As for Samar’s employer, hope the HT will suspend Samar at least for a while just as CNN and TIME did.

You need help, there are special doctors for people like you. You don’t know what plagiarism is. How can data be plagiarized. Get you mental health checked. Would be good for you and others who read your blog.

But Frances is credited in the piece. Attribution in newspapers is not like footnotes in books with details of article, issue, volume No. of publication. Public data/stats do not need attribution at every point, it’s not an academic submission. I don’t know what your and Halarnkar’s precise past problems are, but you are clearly missing the woods for the trees, if all that you can conclude at the end of this piece is some misplaced eureka moment of plagiarism-policing.

dude, have you ever stepped out of your gurgaon office? or do you simply keep trawling the net in your effort to shape India in the 21st century as some self-proclaimed right-winger? dont your right-wing swadeshi leanings give you a prickly conscience about working for a US MNC and only filling your own pocket with dollars? Have you ever done anything at all to even think about the hunger issue? i had no clue who samar halarnkar was before this, but after reading his previous body of work on the issue, i’m sorry, but you are clearly not doing much for the country yourself, while he’s done some serious reportage. Are you even doing justice to your engineering degree or have you wasted that too in some MNC admin / management job?

Hello! I realize this is kind of off-topic however I needed to ask. Does operating a well-established website like yours require a massive amount work? I am completely new to blogging but I do write in my diary every day. I’d like to start a blog so I will be able to share my experience and feelings online. Please let me know if you have any kind of suggestions or tips for new aspiring blog owners. Appreciate it!

I don’t think Samar’s piece was an act of plagiarism. He changed the language and presented the facts in his own words. Data and hard facts cannot be plagiarised. Also, it is not possible to make attributions after every para. This is an article in a newspaper, not a doctoral thesis.